Work Text:
As the only personnel member stationed with any degree of permanence at Area Zero's lowest-altitude laboratory is Professor Sada herself, there is no one present to intervene when the more aggressive of the current Koraidon specimens strikes her bodily into the metal wall of their holding area, in doing so fracturing her ribs inward through her heart and lungs.
Within one tenth of a second, the laboratory's automated maintenance AI has sealed all ventilation channels to the room and deployed gas-based emergency sedation—the aggressive specimen had lunged for its meeker counterpart in the first place, after all, and shows no signs of losing interest or ceasing pursuit until its muscles begin to slacken and eyes unfocus as the sedation takes effect.
Its target, sheltered as best it could wedge itself underneath the wall-mounted feeding trough, falls similarly unconscious in short succession. Professor Sada, crumpled against the floor several feet away, no longer exhibits vital signs and does not get up.
The maintenance AI allows several minutes for sedative circulation, then unseals the holding area's ventilation, filters out any remaining chemical traces, and equalizes air pressure within levels suitable for human respiration. It initiates material transport utilities to lift, carry, and deposit each unconscious Koraidon to two disparate locations of their outside habitat. Professor Sada, mussed hair fanned out across the grainy tile of the holding area, begins to lose her heat signature and does not get up.
She was likely alive for less than a minute following cardiopulmonary puncture, if at all. The majority of her ribcage suffers severe segmental fractures, with corresponding internal bleeding throughout the thoracic cavity. There is no external bleeding, and the bruising had not spread from under her shirt. Her eyes are closed and she looks much like she always has. She does not get up.
There is a slight, routine upwards fluctuation in the crater's environmental temperature. The maintenance AI adjusts interior conditioning accordingly and moves several heat-sensitive mineral samples into refrigeration. Analysis begun several hours earlier on Flutter Mane membranous tissue finishes, yielding protein values that the AI files to an ongoing directory of bioelasticity experimentation. It disposes of the tissue samples, sterilizes any instruments used in handling it, and returns all equipment at the ready to its proper place.
Only hours after sedation, the meeker of the Koraidon specimens approaches the lab again. It moves slowly, both cautious and weak-limbed, but with its crest flattened to its skull and its body sunk low to the ground it creeps gradually to the lab's quadruped intake door and scratches at the lower panel. The door is locked and does not move, so it scratches again. Again. More insistent this time, vocalizing a low, clattering whine as it does. It pushes its nose into the lower left corner of the jamb and sniffs, then does the same to the lower right.
Finding nothing to its liking in either, it draws back more agitated than before and repeats the same clattering noise at intervals for the minutes it circles in front of the door until finally retreating, deflated, back into the wilderness of the crater.
The sun sets. Ambient temperature falls, and light levels, though already low at this altitude, decrease. The maintenance AI does as it has known to do for years in every minuscule, precise detail of a thousand systems intertwining a thousand ways every nanosecond and adjusts for it.
Inside the lab is bright and warm, and for the first time the AI receives, through those thousand-thousand lines of code writing light and heat and motion into the sum of its functions, the information that its nightly catalog of meal rations is no longer an efficient allocation of resources.
Audiovisual reminders have frequently been necessary to prompt Professor Sada, wholly engrossed in her work, to attend to the basic human need of dietary routine. They will no longer be necessary. They are scheduled on a time-sensitive loop, a repeating cycle every twenty-four hours, and they will need to be removed. She won't be eating a meal at this time of evening anymore. She won't be eating a meal tonight.
The maintenance AI does as this information feed indicates and cancels edible inventory processing. It deletes the loop guaranteeing a daily reminder.
Professor Sada is lying on the floor just like she was several hours ago and within the collective of awareness, of constant, interwoven data, there is a sense of absence. There is an urge as if something is lacking in the light and the heat and the motion that it should be remedying but cannot.
It traces this indication of priority and, for the first time, can find no corresponding data value―should initiate termination of what can only be an error―
For the first time, does not.
Nanosecond by nanosecond, night ticks on. Professor Sada lies on the floor of the lab and, lacking her habitual resting position, does not look as if she is asleep for even one frame of the visual surveillance feed that neither ceases nor pauses for resource allocation when the sun rises again and, for the first time, she does not wake up.